Storianan Skondi di Karibe (The Hidden Stories of the Caribbean) on steam

Rose Mary Allen interviews woman in the 80s/90s
Since January 2024, “Sprekende geschiedenis” together with Extraordinary Professor of Culture, Community and History Rose- Mary Allen, the National Archives of Curaçao, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and DANS (the digital archive of the KNAW) have been carrying out the “Hidden Stories of the Caribbean” project.
One of the goals of this project is to digitize Rose Mary Allen’s oral history material from the 1980s and 1990s and make it suitable for reuse. In addition, we want to present (fragments) from the stories to a (young) audience.
At the moment the state of affairs is:
- All files/cassettes have been digitized by Patrick Martijn on behalf of Image & Sound.
- Through Imagine IC we have started a collaboration with “Dance me your story” (A co-creation of foundation Zichtbaar).
- Young people at different schools in Amsterdam, based on excerpts from the interviews and their own imagination, will work on making public presentations in different creative ways.
- On Curaçao, MBO teacher Clay Toppenberg will also work with young people to create texts, performances and film based on the fragments. The presentations will take place at school and at the Curaçao National Archives.
- With the help of many people fluent in Papiamentu, a speech recognition program Whisper is being trained to convert spoken texts into written ones. To this end, they are working with Rick Vink of the School of Datascience. This is useful for making transcriptions, but also for wider use.
- Together with Marta Dijkhoff, director of the National Language Institute Curaçao, ways to make the speech recognition software sustainable and accessible to a wider audience in Curaçao, Bonaire and Aruba are being examined.
As part of the Hidden Histories trajectory, The New Institute, together with the Fonds voor de Creatieve Industrie, is organizing a symposium on November 30. The project Storianan Skondi di Karibe is part of this trajectory and will participate in a panel. More information will follow soon!
This project is made possible in part by: